Part 18

Lady Bankes’ death, as recorded on a monument of white marble at Rislip, took place on April 11th, 1661. So little was her death expected, that her eldest son was married on the morning of the day on which she died.

The following letters, in their quaint spelling, as to the missing furniture from Corfe Castle, are characteristic:

For my noble friend Sir Ralph Bankes at Chettle.

From John Bingham Esq^{r}. Bingham’s Melcombe.

Nobel sir,

My being in phisicke made me not to send an answer to your servant’s letter last Sunday. I beseech you let it plead my excuse.

Sir, I have a large bed, a single velvet red chair and a suite of fine damask; had not the horse plague swept away my horses I would have sent these to you. I beg that you’ll please to command one of your servants to come to Blandford next Friday morning by 10 o’clock there these things shall be ready for him at the Crowne Hotel.

That yet a continual gale of happinefs may ever blow on you here below the stars and that you may yet enjoy heaven hereafter is the real wish of

Sir Your very hearty servant John Byngham.

Sir I humbly entreat the tender of my humbel service to my Ladey Bankes.

One other letter, having the same address, appears to have been written within a few days of the date of the former letter:—

Nobel Sir,

I have sent to Blandford to be delivered your servant one large bed, 2 blankets; the bed for 12 years since was opened by a wench at my then house at Byngham’s Melcombe when I was in the Isle of Guernsey and feathers stolne out and divers other such tricks done by her in my being out of the land.

I take the boldness to hint this trick to you likewise I have sent to Blandford a full sute (that is as many as ever I had) of old fine damask table cupboard cloths and napkins in particular two long table cloths a large cupboard cloth, 2 towels long, a red velvet chaire.

Sir, had I more as I promised yourself I would have sent it.

Sir, the Linnen was but once used by me, but whited once in 2 years.

Your humble servant John Byngham.

One large bed, minus the feathers, and one red velvet chair, appear to constitute the amount of furniture recovered by Sir Ralph Bankes from the hands of the sequestrators; and Sir Ralph ought to have considered himself very fortunate inasmuch as these sequestrators had not made away with the estates themselves.

Sir Ralph Bankes did not live to witness another revolution, or to see the final expulsion of the royal race in whose cause his family had suffered so severely: he completed the mansion at Kingston Lacy, and died when his son was under age.

* * * * *

The original MS. of the old Corfe Castle legend of the Christmas Pie is still said to be in existence in the Muniment Room at Kingston Lacy amongst the other Corfe Castle documents.

Lady Bankes’ grandmother, Mrs. Hawtrey, was happy in the birth of many daughters, who were well instructed in all the maidenly duties of that good and pious time. Of the use of the needle, and the Greek and Latin tongues, none could surpass them; and as to playing on the virginals and clavycorde, it was wonderful to listen to them. But Mistress Hawtrey did most insist on every young maiden knowing the cookcraft (for so did she style it) of the kitchen.

Beauty fadeth like a flower. Music can little delight the husband When he becometh hard of hearing,

she would say; and then solemnly add:

The best cook doth always secure the best husband.

Now, to preserve the early lessons so taught to her daughters, from the day when they could first rest their little chins upon the dresser, she did have them fully instructed in this art of cooking. And then did she require of them all a promise, strictly to be observed, that on every Christmas Day in every year these her daughters should themselves prepare and set forth upon her table a number of mince-pies equalling exactly in the sum of them the number of years since the day of her so happy marriage; and so it was that when she had been married fifty-nine years complete there did appear upon her table fifty-nine mince-pies. But in the following year her daughters conspired how, for the yet greater satisfaction and surprised pleasure of this their beloved parent, they did, with great labour and curiosity of art, continue one great and noble pie a born baby might rest therein; and this they filled with those many and rare refections suitable to the great work they had in hand: to complete the whole did they upraise on the crown of the crust the letters L X—two letters large and noble—clearly denoting thereby the three-score returns of that fertile marriage-day from whence themselves were so happily sprung. The knowledge of this rare structure is withheld from the good old dame until the hall is decked with Christmas garnishings. The pie is placed upon the table, and the old lady entereth and is seated, but the beholding of this pie hath an effect on this good old lady far differing from that which then her beloved offspring intended. Alas! she cannot touch a morsel. A novelty so strange she cannot realise, nor can she digest the ancient promise broken. Mayhap she did apprehend whether an ape should leap forth, or a dwarf, or a Denmark owl, for such conceits had been known at the banquets of persons of high condition. Be this as it may, the old lady is carried to her chamber in a swoon; her daughters like demented beings hurry to and fro—nothing is left unendeavoured on their parts. The medicine chest is unclosed. Scores of healthful medicaments are brought forth. They give to her of them all: yet did the good old lady die, and was laid straight and quiet in her coffin, before the mince-pie had sufficient time to cool.

POOLE

BY W. K. GILL

Some, even of those who know a little of Poole, may wonder at the idea that a town so modern to all appearance should have anything of antiquity about it. To the motorist, bound westward from Bournemouth, Poole is a place with an irritating railway crossing at one end, and an equally provoking bridge at the other. And even to a visitor it will appear but as a commonplace business town—a town of tramcars and electric lights, with a big gasworks on the most approved principles, with wharves piled with timber and quays black with coal, where the colliers come in and out through a fleet of red-sailed barges and big white timber-ships; a town whose very Church and Guildhall are modern, and to whose past only a neglected and mutilated stone building on the Quay bears the slightest witness. But could we open the jealously-guarded charter-chest, and unroll one ancient document after another; could we summon the shadowy file of noble and royal benefactors, from the famous Crusader, the Gordon of his age, who granted the first charter, to that Queen of famous memory, who gave us the last—then, indeed, we should have a pageant fit to compare with that of any town in Dorset. But Poole’s true pageant would be on the water, where, too, the harbour would give her an antiquity not her own. Roman bireme and Saxon keel, Danish longship and Norman galley, quaint craft of Plantagenet and Tudor, strong-stemmed Newfoundlander, and raking privateer of the great French War—the shipping that has sailed in that harbour would bring us down from the Roman period to the long black destroyers of our own day which sometimes lie in main channel from Stakes to Saltern’s Pier. The memories of Poole are not in her ruins, but in her records; for the swift keel leaves no mark, and there is no more trace of the destroyers that lay there last year than of Knut’s long ships that lay there nine hundred years ago.

But let us stroll slowly through the town from the railway station, not by the High Street, but by way of the Guildhall and the Church of St. James the Apostle, down to the Quay, noting, as we go, the signs and vestiges of past days. A few paces from the station is the old town boundary, denoted by a boundstone let into the wall, and this is all that remains to mark the position of the embattled gate erected by charter from Henry VI., and destroyed by order of Charles II.—the embattled gate recorded by Leland that turned back Prince Maurice in the great Civil War. It is amusing to note how Clarendon “veils his wrath in scornful word” as he tells how “in Dorsetshire the enemy had only two little fisher towns, Poole and Lyme.” Here was the main entrance from the north through the fortified gate that gave the name of Towngate Street. (The southern entrance was by ferry, and this way came Leland, the great Tudor antiquary.) There was a sharp fight at this point during the Civil War, mementos of which in the shape of three small cannon-balls were dug up last year, and are now in the local Museum. The story may be summarised thus: Poole as a seaport was of great importance, and the King’s party were most anxious to get hold of it. Attempts were made to corrupt a dashing young partisan leader, Captain Francis Sydenham, of Wynford Eagle (brother of the famous doctor, also a soldier then), who was constantly out on raiding expeditions. Sydenham pretended to yield, but arranged with the Governor, Captain John Bingham, of Bingham’s Melcombe, to have a little surprise for the cavaliers. Accordingly, when Lord Crawford with horse and foot came by night to the outworks that guarded the causeway over the fosse, he was admitted within the half-moon, but found the gates fast, while the cannon and musketry opened on him from the wall. The darkness favoured him, however, and he escaped, but with some loss of men, and more of horses. The small cannon-balls above mentioned were in all probability some of those fired at the Royalists from the wall. This wall, as has been said, was razed by order of Charles II., a retaliation, possibly, for the part Poole had played in the destruction of Corfe Castle. The fosse long remained, and, having been deepened in fear of Prince Charlie as late as 1745, some portion was traceable within the memory of living persons.

A few years after, the King had an opportunity of seeing how his order had been carried out—for, the Court being at Salisbury, to avoid the Plague in 1665, he and some of the courtiers went touring about East Dorset, and one day was spent at Poole. So on September 15th a brilliant company rode into the town by the old causeway. There was the King himself, harsh-featured indeed, but easy and gracious in bearing; Lauderdale, with his coarse features and lolling tongue; Ashley, with his hollow cheeks and keen eyes; Arlington, another of the afterwards infamous Cabal; and, among the rest, but the centre of all attraction, the handsome, boyish face of Monmouth. Ashley was well known in Poole, and many a grim Puritan soldier must have muttered Scriptural curses on his old commander, who had turned courtier for the nonce, but who could not foresee the day when the flags in the port should be half-mast for him, and when his body should be brought from his place of exile in Holland, and the hearse should pass along the very road he had just ridden so gallantly to the old church of Wimborne St. Giles. Still less could young Monmouth foresee the day when, twenty years later, turning and doubling like a hunted hare, he should cross that road in his desperate and vain effort to reach the shelter of the great Forest. And little did his father think that Antony Etricke, “learned in the laws of England,” whom he appointed Recorder of Poole, should be the man before whom his favourite son would be brought for identification. Down the street rode the gay cavalcade—plumed hats, curled wigs, velvets and laces, gallant horses and all—over the open ground that extended halfway down the town, till they came to the house of Peter Hiley, which then stood about opposite where now is the National and Provincial Bank. The house has long since gone, but there they were entertained by Peter Hall, the Mayor; and afterwards the King went on the water to Brownsea, “and took an exact view of the said island, castle, bay, and this harbour, to his great contentment.” For many a day this visit was remembered, and the cause of the hapless Monmouth was popular in Poole, so that before his final attempt to reach the Forest he had entertained the idea of escaping to Poole, and there taking ship for Holland. A ghastly little note from the Deputy-Mayor of Poole, instructing the tything-men of Higher Lytchett to take delivery of certain heads and quarters of rebels executed in Poole, and to set them up at the cross-roads, is still in existence, and testifies to the executions of the Bloody Assize.

Further down the street comes a cluster of houses that belong to a widely different period, both in the history of the town and of the country. The almshouses, dated 1812, with Nile and Trafalgar Rows on one side, and Wellington Row, 1814, a little way below on the other, recall the great French War, when the open ground at this end of Poole, still called The Parade, though now built over, was the place of exercise for the troops constantly quartered here. In 1796, the 33rd, then Colonel Wellesley’s, regiment was here, and the Colonel’s quarters were over the water at the old manor-house at Hamworthy. But the almshouses, built by a famous Newfoundland merchant, George Garland, bring back quite a different set of memories. Curiously enough, the well-known trade with Newfoundland was at its zenith during the later years of the great war. The English fleet had swept the foreign flag off the seas, and the trade had fallen to the Union Jack. But the trade dated from the time of Queen Elizabeth, and lasted till the middle of the Victorian age. At first the little ships went out year by year, in the season, and returned with their cargoes of oil and fish and skins, without making any stay on the island—little ships of forty to fifty tons, but manned by daring seamen, who faced the Atlantic storms and the Turkish pirates, as well as French or Spanish enemies, year in, year out, with no record save now and then an incidental mention, as when the Mayor of Poole complains to the Privy Council in 1625 of the danger that the fishing fleets ran from the Turkish pirates, Sallee rovers, and the like. In after years settlements were made, and the Poole merchants had their establishments on the island, from which they supplied the fishermen; but the truck system was the only one in vogue, and the oils and fish and seal-pelts were paid for in goods only, the value of which was fixed by the merchant, who thus got his cargoes at his own price, and, buying his supplies wholesale in England, made, naturally, very large profits.

For many years Poole and Newfoundland were intimately connected, but the trade gradually fell off as other countries entered into competition, and the carelessness, bred by monopoly, made the Poole merchants far too independent and unenterprising.

Not far down the street lived a merchant of another sort. Sir Peter Thompson, born in Poole, but for the greater part of his life residing in London, where he carried on a large trade with Hamburg, built for his retirement the fine old Georgian house long used as a hospital. The carved doorway, with its crest and motto, “_Nil conscire sibi_” (not, by-the-bye, the one usually assigned to Sir Peter, which is “_Nulla retrorsum_”); the arms and crest displayed above the doorway, and the height and proportion of the street front, give an air of dignity to the building strangely in contrast with the neat little villas recently put up opposite. The house dates from the time of Prince Charlie, who, indirectly, was the cause of Sir Peter’s knighthood. As High Sheriff of Surrey, the fine old Whig presented a loyal address to George II. when the throne was in danger after Prestonpans, and received the honour of knighthood as a mark of the King’s appreciation. It was in the next year, the year of Culloden, that Sir Peter began the house in which he meant to spend the close of an honourable life in the company of early friends, and in the collection of rare manuscripts and objects of interest, scientific and antiquarian, for he was both an F.R.S. and an F.A.S.; he also aided Hutchins in his monumental _History of Dorset_. Respected for his talents and loved for his kindness, he lived there for some years in dignified ease, and died in 1770.

As yet it will be observed that we have had comparatively modern memories of Poole; but as we go nearer to the Quay, which is the most important element in Poole past and present, we come to older and older buildings, or rather parts of buildings, for it is a feature in the town that the constant, active life of the place has renewed, and so covered up, the old buildings, unlike places whose vigour has long ebbed away and left them with their antiquities unaltered to sleep away the remainder of their allotted time,

And keep the flame from wasting by repose.

And so we pass the modern Guildhall—the old Guildhall was very suitably placed in Fish Street, on the other side of the town, with the gaol, in which John Wesley’s grandfather was imprisoned, under it—and down the market till we pause before the oldest almshouses, where the authorities have put up an inscription which tells all that is certainly known of the buildings, viz., that they were first erected about the time of Henry IV., were the property of one of the mediæval religious guilds, the Guild of St. George, and were seized by the Crown in the time of Edward VI., and afterwards sold to the Corporation. The lower portion and the old wall at the back—in fact, the stonework—may be as old as the days of Joan of Arc, but there has, of course, been a great deal of alteration and rebuilding. Speaking of Joan of Arc, it may be mentioned that John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France, under whose rule she was burned, was Lord of Canford and of Poole, and a few years ago his seal was dug up in cleaning out a ditch on the Hamworthy-Lytchett road. St. James’ Church is, of course, new, though built on the site of the old church, a print of which, with its “handsome tower, covered with a cupola of tin, quite round, in the fashion of a cup,” is given in Sydenham’s _History of Poole_, a work of special merit, written by a competent antiquary, and full of information. Some of the old monumental inscriptions are preserved in the church, notably one to Captain Peter Joliffe. This worthy representative of the old Poole seamen distinguished himself in a sea-fight off Purbeck as follows:—Cruising with only two men in a small vessel, the “Sea Adventurer,” he saw a French privateer make prey of a Weymouth fishing-boat. Though the Frenchman was vastly superior in strength, he boldly attacked him, drove him off, recovered the prize, and then, following up his first success, manœuvred so skilfully as to drive him ashore near Lulworth, where the vessel was broken to pieces and the crew made prisoners. King William III., hearing of this brave deed, sent Captain Peter a gold medal and chain, with a special inscription. This was not his only exploit, and in later years George I. made him military commander of the town. His great-grandson, the Rev. Peter Joliffe, of Sterte, is still remembered as the pattern of a good rector.

Old Poole, as we have noted, clustered round St. James’ Church and the old Guildhall, and, as the remains testify, was mainly of stone, with the stone-flag roofs, that remind one of their Purbeck home. Very near to the church, in the yard of the St. Clement’s Inn, is a small battlemented gateway, supposed to have been a water-gate, a view which has been lately confirmed by the traces of seaweed revealed in digging. This is very probably the piece of wall of which Leland speaks as having been built by Richard III., who “promised large things to the town of Poole.” Hence, when “Richmond was on the seas,” and his storm-driven ship appeared off Sandbanks, an attempt was made to inveigle him on shore; but a warier man than Henry Tudor did not breathe, and, to the disappointment of the authorities, “he weighed up his anchor, halsed up his sails, and having a prosperous and streeinable wind, and a fresh gale sent even by God to deliver him from that peril, arrived safe in Normandy.”